The always eloquent, if at times controversial, historian and author Gary Wills has written a reflection on Catholic Religious Women over at the New York Review of Books that is heartfelt and direct, expressing his take on the recent report from the Vatican’s dicastery that deals with doctrine (the CDF) on the LCWR (leadership conference of women religious). His short piece, titled “Bullying the Nuns,” includes his personal experience of sisters that had made an indelible impact on his life for the better. He laments the move on the part of the CDF and struggles to make sense of the recent formal engagement the Vatican has had with a schismatic group known as the Society of Saint Pius X, while at the same time publicly chiding many women religious in the United States. Whether you agree with his take or not, he offers some food for thought and a personal testimony worth considering. Here are some excerpts:
The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility…
Anne O’Connor was just the kind of nun the Vatican is now intent on punishing. She had been a social worker before she became a nun, work that she loved and went back to several times as a Dominican. She was quick to shed the old habit (which was designed to disguise the fact that there was a woman somewhere in that voluminous disguising of hair, breasts, and hips), and quick to take back her own name. After she took on several high offices in her order, she became the mother provincial of the California branch of the Dominican order during the 1960s, coping with the changes of that volatile era on her college campuses.
Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in “the social Gospel” (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people—which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens…
To read more, go here.
